Mobile camera developers snap up commercial prize

Four researchers from the University of Edinburgh, who all played a key role in the development of the mobile phone camera, have been awarded the Rank Prize for their work in developing and commercialising technology.

Beloved of snappers everywhere – the camera in your mobile has won its designers the Rank Prize

Professor Peter Denyer, Dr David Renshaw, Professor Wang Guoyu and Dr Lu Mingying will receive the £80,000 prize – set up by the late Lord Rank to recognise scientific advances that have benefited mankind – for their camera design work which began in the early 1980s.

Professor Denyer said: “We are immensely pleased to receive this recognition. Our work was not always so well regarded, certainly in its earliest days when the doubters were many and the believers were...well, just ourselves. It is a pleasure for any engineer to see their work in use every day by millions of people, and a great honour to receive this award.”

The team began by producing simple black and white cameras, before moving on to more complex devices. By 1993, they had taken the steps necessary to generate colour images from a tiny electronic sensor produced in CMOS (Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor) technology.

The researchers formed VLSI Vision Ltd, an early Scottish university spin-out business, which subsequently became the first such spin-out to become a public company listed on the London Stock Exchange. ST Microelectronics acquired the business in 1999, and today hundreds of millions of CMOS cameras are in everyday use, in mobile phones and optical computer mice.